The Beard Bunker

Here we are at the end of another year. It is a time to reflect on what we have accomplished over the year. Since this is a hobby blog I'll skip over all the silly adult stuff like jobs, family, etc etc and dive straight into the little plastic toys. I'm only going to cover things that actually got finished. There are a few in progress things that'll be covered in the plan for 2019.  The first part of the year was continuing with my Thousand Sons/Tzeentch project from the year before. I did receive some Horrors and the Acolytes as gifts and got stuck into those.  To finish off that project I went for a ambitious (for me) conversion of a defiler/soul grinder. It was far more sculpting and what have you than I've attempted before. I think it came out alright.  Next up was the super secret Iron Warriors project done for Nerd Thunder in July. Managed to bash that lot out in about a month. Which isn...

It can be hard to make the shift from the skull-filled world of our hobby to the organised jollity of Christmas. In the hopes that it might help, Mark and I teamed up with new Bunker denizen Andy and revised thirteen famous Christmas stories to fit the 41st millennium. Have fun figuring out what they all are. Some of them are REALLY VERY SUBTLE. Very subtle indeed. Tuck in. I Three old navigators are lured off-course by a false astronomicon, which leads them and their ships to an unsanctioned infant psyker of incredible power. Believing him to be a new incarnation of the Emperor, they proclaim His rebirth to the authorities. The child is taken away by the Sisters of Silence and never seen again. II A Necromunda Gang are trying to steal treasure from a vault, taking a rival gang hostage in the process.  A single member of the hostage gang is free and works to thwart the theft culminating in the throwing of the opposition gang leader out the window of the h...

Today we look at two individuals upon whose transhuman shoulders rest the very future of the Blood Angels, especially the 3rd Company. Lets start with the one with arguably the biggest job. Sergeant at Arms Radueriel. The eagle-eyed among you will be saying "now Jeff, you can't fool us, that's not Radueriel, that's Telion..." and you would be right. It has long infuriated us that only the Ultramarines get a character scout to lead a reconnaisance army. It's daft. There should always have been an option to put a character in scout armour and indeed in an older Space Marine codex Telion was considered an archetype and you were supposed to rename him and use him in your successor chapter. Well. I'm taking that one step further and changing him to a Blood Angel. I'm swopping out his Chapter Tactics and calling it good. Uniquely among my scouts, Raduriel has his face on display, partially to help him stand out, mostly because I just love that scu...

Since the introduction of the Primaris Marines with the new edition I've been itching to get my hands on some. I know some people do not like them, I do however. I feel that they are better proportioned than the old marines. I much prefer how they do tower over many other models. I'm not bothered by the scale creep so much as it's all made up anyway. I've also been wanting to try and up my painting game and because of such I decided to start a new project rather than add them to my Dark Angels and have the different levels of painting stand out. Kill Team Cozen So why the Blood Ravens? It's a fairly even split between the visual and the fluff (as always). The think that the red/bone colour scheme is rather handsome and somewhat striking. I also like their background, not knowing who their parent legion was. Although I choose to believe one of the theories that they are in fact The Corvidae, a fellowship of the Thousand Sons that was sent into hiding shortly b...

When Gee-Dubz brought out their Munitorum Armoured Containers, I was (I thought justifiably) scornful. If your shipping containers have been fitted with a gun, you have strayed from the path of the sane. When that gun is a storm bolter, generally reserved for veteran astartes and the like, you are a swivel-eyed nut enthusiast. When there are two such guns attached to each container, I lose the capacity for words and can only laugh. Uncontrollably. As with so many GW kits, though, once you dial the thing back down to 10, it becomes great. The preposterous storm bolters are an optional extra, not mandatory, so when the Killzone: Sector Munitorum box came out the sheer discounty goodness made me look again. I then realised I could double down on the deal by picking up the Tempestus Scions kill team - five dudes and another two Munitorum sprues at a discount? I'll take two, thanks.  So now I have a squad of ten Tempestus Scions storm troopers for my Inquisition warband AND...

One of the most enduring and interesting things about the Blood Angels is their flaw, the terrible Black Rage that dwells within them. As a result of their having to use the preserved blood of their dead Primarch and the Primarch's ability to store their memories genetically, the Blood Angels that succumb to the Rage find themselves reliving Sanguinius' terrible last hours. Rather than let them slide into degredation, the Blood Angels mark those taken by the Black Rage out with black armour and the red saltires of Sanguinius' wounding and let them throw themselves into battle. Within my army there are already 5 jump pack Death Company marines and these 10 bring it up to quite a lot of them for a single company. I'm justifying this lore-wise by the fact that my Captain is apparently the Master of Sacrifice, a nebulously defined role that I've chosen to mean: Finds opportunities to spend the lives of the afflicted. The 3rd Company are on a constant war footing to...

And the Orks will beat a path to your door.   A bit ago , Geoff said that he was about to make a Chinork for the Special Ork Service. As luck would have it… this is something I’ve done recently for my own nefarious purposes, and here is its journey from bits to hits.. Or something.   Now, other than the joy of having my own unique thing, why would I bother scratch building it when Forgeworld make one?   This one in fact .   Trouble is… I don’t particularly like the Forgeworld model.. For me, it looks too tall, too bulky and it doesn’t ‘feel’ like it could fly.   The ‘feel’ of a model is an important thing for me. Whilst a model (particularly an Ork one) doesn’t necessarily need to have all the bits that would make it function, it does have to look like it would or could work. My biggest problem with the FW Chinork is that it looks like the chain drive (running from the rear mounted engine to the front mount...

Here's one way to get more of your friends into gaming with miniatures: get them hooked on RPGs first. This may well be old knowledge, but I'm new to it. Two friends, Becs and Drew, have been helping Jeff and I test our new RPG ("wait, you wrote an entire roleplaying game?" ...yes we did, check out last month's post ). Having never played an RPG before they were both soon enthralled and taking any opportunity to roleplay in any setting. This soon led to playing Inquisitor (or rather, our stripped down version of it, because the original game was ambitious yet clunky). They were enthralled by the macabre dystopian madness of the 40K mythos. Thus, when Jeff said he'd run a game of Deathwatch , they both jumped on it. Just one complication: Deathwatch uses miniatures. My latest Deathwatch mini: Brother-Sergeant Elias. More on him another time. Rather than being put off, they were keen to give it a punt. They split the cost of a Deathwatch box with Ja...

As many of you might be aware, in addition to wargamers, most of us here at the Bunker are also keen roleplayers. Two of us (Charlie and Jeff) seem unhealthily keen as, well, we've made an entire roleplaying game! With the help of over twenty playtesters and big chunks of free time over the last four years, it's finally ready. It's called The Ministry of Extramundane Affairs , and the pre-release version can be downloaded, for free, at our new website: TwoBeard Games . Carry on reading this post to find out some basics about the setting, the rules, and just what we mean by 'pre-release version.' The setting In Ministry  you play a field officer working for the secret government department policing Great Britain's shadow society of paranormal inhabitants. Unbeknownst to the public, every fairy tale, myth, legend, nightmare and half-remembered old wives' tale is real. Just in case that wasn't enough to keep you busy, the story is set in 1941: right...